Concretopias and Beyond

A display of work by school children exploring how developments of the 1960s and 1970s have influenced their relationship with where they live.

As part of Concrete Dreams (on display until 1 June 2025), the Farrell Centre has been working with three local schools to explore three significant sites of transformation during the 1960s and 1970s: Trinity Square in Gateshead, Felling Swimming Baths and the Byker Estate. This display features work produced by Year 5 school children from Byker Primary School who have been investigating the Byker Estate – where many of them live and where their school is located.

Working with geographer Mike Jeffries, who over the past decade has helped a range of groups to create personal experience maps of their local areas, the children started by tearing up tourist maps of Tyneside, replacing the civic grandeur and cultural icons with the real world do family, home and pets, often mixing physical streets with virtual spaces and computer games. In these maps, we see the city depicted by those whose voices are rarely heard.

The children also participated in workshops at school and at the Farrell Centre where they created artwork responding to the estate’s distinctive colour palette and materials. For the collages on show in the display, the children dissected images of the estate’s striking architecture into simple shapes and colours before laying them on a flat-bed scanner – creating images reflecting how they see and understand the estate and their place within it.

Community mapping

Maps are not simply about helping you get from point A to B. They are also about power and control. Maps bring worlds into being, prioritising certain places over others and determining who is allowed to go where. For this reason, maps have been used historically by those with power to control those without.

Over the past decade Mike Jeffries has explored how to reverse this imbalance by providing the young people of Tyneside with the opportunity to create maps of their own worlds. Working in collaboration with John Swords, Sebastian Messer, Jeffries helped a wide range of community groups, university students and school children to create their own personal experience maps of Tyneside.

Mike Jeffries is an ecologist based in Geography & Environmental Sciences at Northumbria University with a particular interest in ponds, wetland and the interplay of time and chanced on ecological communities. He uses visual methods such as collage, zines and map making to help people explore and represent their worlds, ranging from urban skateboarders in Tyneside to conservationists rewilding Kielder’s Wildwood.

Jon Swords is Reader in Creative Industries Research at the University of York. His background is in economic geography and has research interests in: working practices; geographies of creative work and participatory mapping. He has used visual methodologies in a range of work including urban mapping, social network analysis and critical data studies.

Sebastian Messer is an architect, artist, lecturer and researcher in Architecture at Northumbria University. He is also the RIBA North East regional council Co-Advocate (with Matthew Margetts) for Education and Research. The workshops, exhibitions and events which these mappings represent contributed to his PhD (awarded 2021) investigating young people’s agency in their built environment.

Image credit: Collage created by schoolchildren from Byker Primary School